A MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE
curated by Alessandro Gallicchio

Eva Sauer
©2015

A meditation on violence:

Architectural spaces reflect the characteristics of the people that inhabitate them.

This journey through Europe, from the north, Belfast, down to south of Italy shows scenarios that witness monitoring, confinement and desolation: beginning with the “peace lines” of Belfast, that in fact are walls that preserved Catholic and Protestant people to shoot each other from one house to another.

We travel trough unfinished building shells, memorials for corruption, through military territories confined by walls and barbwire, to hidden trash dumps – overgrown by grass, to second world-war bunkers, an unfinished grave for Costanzo (“Ganascia”) Ciano, a minister of the fascist regime.


As in many dystopias the rampant nature acts redemptive. However, if you look closely, you may see how the plants twist, one into the other, in a slow, choking fight to reach the light. Nature can only exist in a constant tension between life and death, and we, as a part of it, cannot disengage ourselves from it.

Nature’s cycles are also ours, and the events seem to recur eternally.